The present disclosure relates generally to medical monitors and, more particularly, to a user interface that presents medical monitor information for user review.
This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
In the field of healthcare, caregivers (e.g., doctors and other healthcare professionals) often desire to monitor certain physiological characteristics of their patients. Accordingly, a wide variety of devices have been developed for monitoring many such characteristics of a patient. Such devices provide doctors and other healthcare personnel with the information they need to provide the best possible healthcare for their patients. As a result, such monitoring device's have become an indispensable part of modern medicine.
Monitoring devices are often configured as dedicated monitoring units (e.g., a stand-alone pulse oximetry monitor) or a general purpose computer with integral processing circuitry for receiving measurements from medical devices and converting these measurements into medical information that is meaningful to a clinician. Accordingly, such devices typically include hardware and software capability for processing the data and supporting the graphical user interface that displays the data. The relationship between the received data and the displayed data may be complex. For example, raw data may be collected by a sensor and sent to the monitoring device to be amplified, filtered, digitized, calibrated, compared with empirical data, graphed, and/or otherwise processed. This processed data may then be converted to a metric or indicator for display that a clinician may correlate to a clinical condition. In a particular example, in a photoplethysmography system, an optical sensor may collect data from a photodetector and subject the data to a series of manipulations to convert the received photoplethysmography signal into one or more numerical indicators related to a patient's oxygen saturation or heart rate. The photoplethysmography data may also be graphed over time to provide information about ongoing trends. Accordingly, rather than displaying raw data, which may be difficult to interpret, the monitoring devices may present medical parameter data using graphical images or numerical indicators, which may be more user-friendly.
As clinicians have become more accustomed to having access to data from medical monitoring devices, their comfort with and ability to use the data provided by these devices has grown. Accordingly, these devices have achieved widespread clinical acceptance. However, at the same time, the capabilities of medical devices have also grown. For example, newer monitoring devices may be capable of presenting additional information related to the measured parameters or may be connected to different types of sensors that provide information about new parameters. As additional indicators and information are added to existing monitoring capabilities, clinical acceptance of these tools may be limited by a clinician's ability to understand and interpret the displayed data that is related to these indicators and/or information.